Page 30 of Make Her Scream

With my head bent, and every muscle in my body tense, I whip the leather across the skin of my back as hard as I can.

“Aargh!”

I can’t help the cry that escapes from between my clenched teeth as white-hot pain slashes through my nerve endings.

The door to the altar room flies open.

“Stop!”

Ophelia is standing there, her beautiful, mismatched eyes wide in horror, her long, pale hair loose around her face and shoulders. God, she’s so incredible, the sight of her squeezes my heart, and I almost forget what she’s just caught me doing. Then the wave of shame washes over me, so powerful I think I might drown in it.

“Hurt me!” she cries, pulling down the straps of her tank top to bare her back and falling to her knees. “Hit me!”

I freeze at her words. “What? No! I would never⁠—”

“You might as well, because I will feel every lash you give yourself as though it’s one of my own. Your pain is my pain, Roman!”

“Ophelia, please…”

“You can’t do this,” she sobs. “We escaped. We got away from them. Don’t let them destroy us when we’re the ones who won.”

“Not destroy us. Destroy me. I’m the one who deserves to be destroyed. They hurt you. They touched you, and I set the whole thing up.”

She crawls into my lap and cups my face in her palms. “Roman, baby, do you think I’m weak?”

Again, she shocks me with her words. “How can you say that?”

“Because you clearly don’t think I’m strong enough to get past this.”

I shake my head. “I don’t believe that.”

“Then why are you punishing yourself? You were trying to do something sweet for me, and I truly do appreciate that. If it hadn’t been for the brothers, we’d have had the best time.” She presses a kiss to my mouth, and I taste the salt of her tears.

I still struggle to look at her. “They took so much from us. They ruined how we use our masks, how we take pleasure from the chase.”

She ducks down to look into my eyes. “Only if we let them, so let’s not. Let’s take it back. That’s our thing, not theirs. Nothing is theirs anymore. They’re dead and gone.” She pauses, her mind clearly going over something, before she speaks again, her tone filled with determination. “We need to do it again, except knowing there’s no chance of the brothers hurting us or anyone else.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s Halloween tomorrow. What better time to go back and redo our chase, only this time it ends how we want it to.”

I stare at her. “Are you serious?”

She sets her small chin and looks me in the eye. “Deadly.”

I consider what she’s saying. “The police might be there, or the owners of the land might have gotten word that something was on fire.”

“We can suss it out first. If it’s quiet, we can make it our own.”

It blows my mind that she’s suggesting this, but she’s right, isn’t she? This is what we did for her to help her get over her horror of the Prophet, the man who ran the cult she escaped.

We need to rewrite the horror of the funfair to our own story.

20

CAIN

“Are you fucking serious?” I stare at them in shock.